Pyramid Pick
Return To White Plume Mountain
Published by TSR/Wizards of the Coast
Written by Bruce R. Cordell
64 Pages, $12.95
Part of TSR's 25th Anniversary Series, Return to White Plume Mountain is a revisiting of one of the earliest modules released by TSR -- S2: White Plume Mountain by Lawrence Schick. As the name implies, The Return To . . . series revives some of the classic adventures that formed the shared history of many long-time D&Ders. The module is for 4 to 10 characters of 7th to 10th level, with a recommended minimum level total of 45.The adventure consists of, essentially, a dungeon crawl. Appropriately so, since the original adventure was exactly that; it concerned a party of adventurers tasked with penetrating the active volcano lair of the (vanished) arch-wizard Keraptis to recover three powerful magic weapons. Return expands upon the scope of the original adventure -- four false Kerapti, former servants of the wizard who each believe they are the archwizard, each hold a portion of the tunnels under White Plume Mountain. It is the job of the PCs to recover the (now four) magic weapons of Keraptis from these pretenders. The adventure gives the PCs opportunities to work with the various factions, but in the end it still comes down to standard, alignment-based politics -- the factions are all ultimately evil and must be destroyed. RTWPM does suffer what I consider the "normal" AD&D module flaws -- way too many magic items as treasure, wandering monsters, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 11, 2000
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